


the rhythm of this night (of this life)

by btBatt



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen, Halloween, Homelessness, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pre-Canon, Recreational Drug Use, aka Klaus is resilient and Ben wishes he could do more
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:34:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27292780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/btBatt/pseuds/btBatt
Summary: “This holiday sucks,” Klaus mumbles as he heaves himself into a sitting position, achy and vaguely embarrassed. The fucking shadow monster is still watching him intently, snarling and lunging and shrieking, but the sun is starting to come up, hazy and diffuse, just enough that Klaus can almost ignore the thing. “I’m suing.”He doesn’t sayI can’t do this,even though it’s the only real thought rattling through his skull, because it would be a low blow to say that to his dead brother, but also because he’s afraid that if he acknowledges how hopeless his situation is out loud, he really won’t be able to make himself get up off the ground.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 31





	the rhythm of this night (of this life)

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween! I started this around the time the first issue of _You Look Like Death_ came out, mostly as an exploration of what Klaus's experience would've been if he'd been kicked out by Reginald rather than (as I'd sort of assumed before) if he'd run away of his own volition. Takes place pretty soon after their 18th birthday, and during Klaus's first Halloween away from the Academy.

Klaus at eighteen is neurotic and aimless and dysfunctional, but he rationalizes that it’s an understandable combination when someone’s raised to be part of a superhero team even though they have a useless superpower, are woefully undersocialized, have no money, and have recently been kicked out.

He’s not supid, and he’s not yet at the point of pretending he is or manifesting that reality. It’s obvious that Reginald only let him stay so long so the state wouldn’t get on his case about abandoning what is legally his son. Or maybe Hargreeves just didn’t want the state to be in possession of one of his failed experiments. Whatever, same difference. Anyway, he guesses it was kind of nice that dear ol’ Dad waited until the week after their birthday to kick Klaus out, rather than it happening on the actual day. More likely than not, the prick just didn’t notice his children’s age of legal adulthood rolling around until a week after the fact.

(Klaus thinks, bitterly, that he would be having a better time out here if he were as stupid as his family assumes he is.)

So, here he is, almost blindingly alone in the city in late October. The sort-of-friends he’d been staying with kicked him out this morning because of someone’s boyfriend issuing an ultimatum and something-something; Klaus had tuned out at that point. The real story is that Nate doesn’t trust Klaus to keep his mouth shut about the blowjob he got in exchange for a baggie full of coke.

To add insult to injury, Cora-who-dresses-punk-but-wants-to-be-goth had guiltily pulled him aside before he left and invited him to her friend’s Halloween party tomorrow night, which. _Fuck._

“You look cold,” Ben points out from where he’s perched owl-like on the back of the park bench Klaus is sitting on. He’s hunched over in his angsty leather jacket, hands shoved deep into the pockets even though Klaus knows he can’t feel the nip in the air.

Klaus throws his head back and groans, squinting up into the weirdly bright late afternoon. It’s definitely chilly and overcast in the thin-white-sheet-stretched-over-the-sky way that makes his headache worse.

“What am I supposed to do _now?”_ he whines. A woman passing with a stroller glances at him and steers a wide arc around his and Ben’s bench. Whoops.

It’s late and only getting later, and he’s sitting in the park with his backpack between his feet on the ground. It was a bitch and a half to lug around all day, but Klaus doesn’t know where he could possibly put it that would be safe. Then again, he doesn’t know where to hide _himself_ for the night either, where he’s supposed to park his useless meatsack of a body until tomorrow—until Halloween officially starts, and he doesn’t even want to think about that. Hands trembling, Klaus reaches down for the side-pocket meant to hold a water bottle and fishes out his pack and a lighter. If his fingers have to be cold at least his lungs can be warm, he reasons.

Ben stops nervously gnawing on his lip to ask, “Do you have any money?”

Klaus shrugs from where he’s trying to shield his cigarette enough to light it.

“Thirty bucks,” he says from the corner of his mouth. Ben grimaces and stares intently at the tree across the path from them. It’s a useless amount of money to have, not enough for a motel room for a whole night, but it was all closeted-Nate had in his wallet when Klaus was “gathering up his things.”

The quiet stretches between them long enough for Klaus’s anxiety to make itself known.

It’s not that he hates Halloween, not really. There are certain aspects of the holiday he can get behind: the slutty costumes and the raucous partying, and even kids throwing eggs at some poor sap’s front door are all objectively pretty amazing. It’s just that, unfortunately, reality tends to go a little wonky on All Hallow’s Eve.

Klaus doesn’t claim to know what’s going on in terms of his power. Off-and-on through the years, he really has tried to figure it out, at least insofar as to be able to function. He never did learn much useful information, but he’s amassed a small catalogue of facts. Like, he knows that drugs work to dampen the ghosts, except for Ben, which he theorizes is because of the ties they had in life making the afterlife connection more powerful. He knows that ghosts are usually tethered to the world somehow, and sometimes at multiple points, the most common of which are the places they died and their graves, but at times it can be something as innocuous as a necklace or a bookmark. He also knows that, for some reason, the Veil between the worlds (or whatever the fuck it actually is) gets spiderweb-thin on Halloween. Klaus doesn’t know which civilization got it right in the course of history, or if it was just a lucky guess, but it makes his life a living hell, pun intended.

The sheer volume of spirits increases to nearly deafening levels, and they’re harder to tamp down, even with chemical aid. Each ghost is more real somehow, or maybe it’s just that different types of ghosts show up on Halloween. Some are the run-of-the-mill variety, lost and angry and pleading with Klaus to help them, even though he never can, and that’s bad enough, to have so many of them around, all calling out to him and following him wherever he goes, but it’s not just that. Sandwiching the normal spirits are two extremes on opposite ends of the spectrum: the exceptionally human-like on one end, and the completely inhuman on the other.

Klaus watches the park vacantly, one knee bouncing rapidly as he takes another drag. There are a couple of kids throwing a frisbee back and forth, a hipster walking their dog, and a man in a black overcoat and hat who Klaus doesn’t realize is dead until the hipster’s dog walks right through where his ankles are supposed to be. Clenching his jaw hard enough to chip a tooth, Klaus glares at the tree Ben’s looking at and hopes the business ghost didn’t notice him looking. Once one of them catches on, the rest are always hot on their heels.

Some of the specters that come out to play on Halloween are just… so normal looking. They remind him more of Ben than anything. Ben, who can carry a conversation. Ben, who’s definitely aged since his death. Ben, who moves through the world of his own volition and can change his clothes and, just, _change_ despite being dead. Most of these ghosts don’t even really _want_ anything from him. Most of the issue is that, like the ghost currently watching the frisbee match with vague interest, they don’t look dead like normal ghosts do, and it’s a nice change from the grisly things Klaus is commonly subjected to, but it makes him look downright insane.

He remembers being fourteen, and the mission they did on Halloween that year. Klaus was three sentences into answering a question from a dead reporter at the press conference afterwards before Diego elbowed him in the ribs and Allison had to laugh it off to a whole crowd of people. Klaus had laughed it off too, but he also saw the headlines afterwards, the speculation of his attention-seeking ploy and mental problems. All in all, though, they’re pretty inconsequential.

The other end of the spectrum is terrifying. If the Ben-level ghosts are almost still entirely human beings sans bodies and the normal ghosts are humanity-less echoes of what they used to be, screaming and stagnant and searching, then the last kind have negative humanity. Sometimes, Klaus thinks that people must have an intuitive sense of them, even if no one else can see them like Klaus does, the same sense that led Halloween to exist on the right day. Klaus thinks that people rationalize their sense of these spirits by believing in demons. And who knows? Maybe they’re right, maybe that’s what they are. He sure as fuck doesn’t know.

The twisted, demented spirits don’t look anything like people. Humanoid-ish, if Klaus is being generous. They don’t have eyeballs or skin, and they never say his name like the other ones do. All they do is hiss and howl and, weirdly enough, _click,_ and they ooze black sludge rather than blood. They follow people sometimes, or cling to walls, or swim through the ground like they don’t remember standing atop it in life.

Worst of all, they don’t seem to want anything from Klaus, as far as he can tell. It’s ironic, because one of the things he hates most about ghosts normally is that they always want something from him, be it salvation or revenge or life. These evil _things_ will just catch his eye and jump at him like they’re trying to tear him apart.

“We should go get some food before everything closes for the night,” Ben says an indeterminate amount of time later. The sun has almost entirely set and Klaus is shivering, half from the cold and half from the dread turning his nerves to static.

“Okay,” Klaus hears himself say, and he fumbles his arms through the straps of his backpack.

***

Klaus remembers thinking that Ben’s probably right, and probably just looking out for him. He should eat before he blows the money on something stupid, before midnight strikes and reality melts into a hellscape.

 _”Klaus!”_ someone shrieks as he and Ben walk down Sixth Avenue, and Klaus flinches and turns to look like an _idiot_ to see a teenage boy barefoot in the street with his wrists slit. There’s a customary burst of adrenaline before he realizes nobody else on the street is looking at the kid and he squeezes his eyes shut.

“Fuck,” he whimpers. He smoked a bowl and a half with Gay Nate and his clueless girlfriend before leaving the house for good, but either it’s wearing off or the ghosts are already tapping into the spooky energy. The kid in the street is crying and calling his name again.

“Come on, Klaus,” Ben says lightly, and Klaus wants to punch him. “Griddy’s is right up here, we could get donuts.”

They almost make it to Griddy’s, except they both know they were never actually going to make it there. Two blocks later they pass by a club that’s already in full swing, a list of “Halloweekend Specials” advertised by a flyer taped to the front door. He watches a couple of women walk in, and there’s no one at the front door checking IDs, which also means there’s no cover charge, which Klaus decides to take as a sign from the universe as he makes a hard left to slip in behind them. Ben groans but surprisingly doesn’t try to convince him otherwise. It feels like the kind of thing Ben would normally start an argument over, but Klaus thinks that maybe Ben’s giving him a pass for one of the shittiest days of the year, so he should make the most of it.

He spends ten dollars on shots and the bartender lets him put his backpack behind the bar, so he dances until he can feel his toes again. He inserts himself into a boisterous group of college-aged kids and compliments them until they buy him some more shots. The world dims pleasantly around him for a while and he surrenders himself to it. At one point, he doesn’t react to Jim-with-the-pretty-eyes calling his name until someone grabs his shoulder, and he laughs it off, says how much he _loves this song_ and declares it _their song._

There are at least seven ghosts in the club but, even so, he manages to have a good time. He makes out with Jim’s friend Lacy in the corner for a while, and then they do a couple lines of coke in the bathroom, and a few more shots back at the bar. Around one in the morning, he goes out to the alley with Jim’s other friend Derek to smoke a joint. He very nearly goes back to the dorms with Derek, but ends up getting left behind when he has to spend ten minutes convincing the bouncer—because _now_ there’s a bouncer—to let him go back in for his backpack. He goes to a different bar after that, tries halfheartedly to find someone else to take him home for the night, and settles for letting an Umbrella Academy fanboy buy him drinks. He even sells the guy one of the old comics he took from the Academy on his way out, signed and everything.

When Klaus wakes up in the morning, he’s inexplicably back in the park, freezing cold sitting at a table under a picnic shelter, his head no longer pillowed by his arms and a splinter sticking out of his cheek.

“Morning,” he grunts at Ben when he notices his brother sending a death-glare out into the misty rain. He waits a moment, but Ben seems to be giving him the silent treatment.

“Fair enough,” Klaus sighs.

In the next five minutes, he notices that his backpack is gone, but there’s now $110 stuffed in his hightops. He’s a little hungover from the alcohol, groggy from the weed, and shaky from the coke, perfectly content to stew in his nauseous misery until a twisted-garish _thing_ lunges at him from absolutely nowhere.

Klaus screams, and flails, and the scream cuts off in a sob as his whole body protests. He ends up in the mud, arms raised to protect his face. The demon-thing’s scalp is torn off most of the way, just dangling by a flap of fake-looking skin. It has no eyes, but Klaus gets the sense of making eye contact nonetheless, just a brief moment of it, where they both realize it can’t touch Klaus, and then it’s gurgle-howling in his face, mouth open to rotting fangs, and Klaus curls into the fetal position and covers his head, crying from fear and how thoroughly awful his body feels and the overwhelming sense of _alone._

“Klaus,” Ben says eventually, and Klaus only cries harder in relief and guilt for what he’s making his brother witness. He wants to keep his eyes closed until he wakes up in his bed. He wants to stay curled up on the ground until he never has to get up again.

“Come on,” Ben says after a stretch of silence, after Klaus stops crying quite so much. He doesn’t say _it’s okay,_ because Ben doesn’t usually lie to him, and they both know it’s not.

“This holiday sucks,” Klaus mumbles as he heaves himself into a sitting position, achy and vaguely embarrassed. The fucking shadow monster is still watching him intently, snarling and lunging and shrieking, but the sun is starting to come up, hazy and diffuse, just enough that Klaus can almost ignore the thing. “I’m suing.”

He doesn’t say _I can’t do this,_ even though it’s the only real thought rattling through his skull, because it would be a low blow to say that to his dead brother, but also because he’s afraid that if he acknowledges how hopeless his situation is out loud, he really won’t be able to make himself get up off the ground.

Ben’s face screws up into a sympathetic grimace where he’s balanced on the balls of his feet about a yard away, and Klaus is glad that it’s Ben stuck with him, because there are certain things this particular sibling just gets without Klaus having to explain. Halloween’s always sucked the most for Klaus, but Ben’s a solid second. He spent most of his life with the moniker of the Horror for a reason, and Klaus knows that a holiday dedicated to monsters and terror has never sat well with him, especially after the Academy went public and they started getting kids dressing up as them to trick-or-treat.

“If you’re starting a petition, feel free to put my name down,” Ben says, bitter and tired. There are two more ghosts by now, thankfully just the run-of-the-mill variety, but very screamy. Klaus has to watch Ben’s mouth as he talks because he can hardly hear, and he knows it’ll only get worse as the day goes on.

“Ugh,” Klaus says, a shiver wracking his body as he calms down enough to feel the light rain and the mud and the post-dancing sweat caked into his pores. Ben’s grimace this time is less sympathetic, more judgemental, but Klaus figures he deserves it.

“Let’s go get warmed up,” Ben says like it’s a friendly suggestion, like he has a body of his own that gets cold and numb dirty.

***

They wait around for a while at the park, hopping from one picnic shelter to another in an attempt to keep some distance between himself and the ghosts as he waits for the city worker to come unlock the public bathrooms. It sort of works, with a couple of his not-at-all-secret admirers. Ghost physics aren’t exactly universal, but the rule of thumb is usually a high correlation between ghostliness awareness and the ghost-like ability to disappear and rematerialize. A lot of the normal ghosts don’t quite understand that they’re dead and therefore not tied to a physical body, so they simply continue to wander around like car crash victims roaming the highway in shock.

When the bathroom’s finally opened, Klaus spends a while scraping and wiping mud off himself and his clothing. With toilet paper, because the park has eco-friendly hand dryers instead of paper towels. He takes a marvelous hangover dump, lets his hands sit under the blasting spray of hot water from the sink until the rest of him is more-or-less warm, and then parks himself in front of the hand dryer for another five minutes just because it’s a single person bathroom and he can.

Eventually he’s driven out by the ghosts, an old woman sobbing brokenly in the corner and the spirit of something twink-sized that doesn’t have eyelids and that circles Klaus like he’s prey, not seeming to notice when it walks through the wall with every pass. By the time he’s done, he thinks he might’ve made the right decision in getting up off the ground.

On the way, they argue over who Klaus would have to sue to get rid of Halloween. He’s pretty sure it would be Hasbro, but Ben’s convinced it would be Disney.

“Why?” Klaus asks, exasperated. “Hasbro’s the one that owns Ouija boards. If anyone’s got stock in the Halloween brand, it’s them!”

He sees Ben shrug from the corner of his eye, but the noise swells to an unbearable peak, a cacophony of “Klaus!” and “Help me!” and “Please, _please—”_ and crying and yelling and choking, and Klaus can’t make out whatever it is that his brother’s saying.

“What?” Klaus asks, turning so he can see Ben’s mouth move. The sidewalk’s crowded, and Klaus nearly collides with a middle-aged woman striding past. He ducks to the side and mumbles a quick, “Pardon.” The guy in a hoodie passing from behind Klaus shoots him a strange look as he speeds up. Klaus twists to check behind him, and—yeah, of course, there’s a hunk of gore where the back of the woman’s skull used to be. He turns back before he can catch her attention again and tries to focus on Ben and walking at the same time.

“Sorry,” he says tiredly, “what was that?”

“Disney owns everything,” Ben repeats patiently, voice raised to be heard over the din. “Disney probably owns Hasbro. You’re going for a head of the hydra when you could just stab it in the heart.”

“Going after Disney would be fucked,” Klaus says, flapping a hand distractedly. “I’m pretty sure Disney and Dad share a lawyer. They’d sooner assassinate me than let me besmirch their holy name.”

“Hasbro will have the same lawyers,” Ben points out. “Might as well go high-risk, high-reward on the payout potential.”

“It’s all an image game,” Klaus argues. “All marketing power and—oof,” he says, having glanced off a broad-shouldered man wearing a Dairy Queen polo. “Sorry!” he calls, but the man’s already moved on, mumbling something under his breath. Shit, Klaus thinks. He’d seen the figure coming but had assumed a ghost. It’s not his fault a dead-soul’s meandering shuffle is indistinguishable from someone on their way to work.

Ben keeps the conversation going as they walk, and Klaus does his best to keep answering even as he takes a detour into a bodega to buy a new pack of cigarettes and lift a lighter with a swirly pink design, since the others disappeared along with his backpack. He’s sure to look insane today anyway with how he keeps dodging people who aren’t there and flinching at absolutely nothing. Talking to himself about the finer points of suing a major corporation is just the cherry on top for the one-man show he feels like he must be giving.

He smokes as they go along, and Ben suggests food again because he never did end up eating last night.

“Yeah, okay,” Klaus says listlessly, figuring he probably should eat if he’s going to be able to get intoxicated to the extent he’ll need to survive today. It’s loud enough to make him slightly nauseous, or maybe he’s still hungover, not actively hungry at all, but he can see Ben’s logic. After another minute he adds, “No donuts though,” thinking that the sugar would definitely make him puke and it’s just too damn early in the day for that.

Ben agrees quickly, and they duck into the first diner they come across. A dubious-looking waitress leads him to a booth tucked away in a far corner, and Klaus orders an omelet, some coffee, and four sides of bacon. She bolts quickly, looking alarmed.

“It’s not _that_ much bacon,” he says with a pout after she’s scampered off. Ben pulls a face from across the table.

“Stop yelling,” Ben says loudly enough to be heard. “I’m pretty sure it’s quiet in here.”

Klaus rolls his eyes, but the reasoning tracks. Despite having to keep reminding Klaus to keep his voice down, Ben keeps talking, keeps asking questions and going on stupid tangents. Klaus eats, and drinks four cups of coffee, and tries to talk too and be _present in the moment_ and whatever. He knows he must look like he’s having some kind of psychotic break, and the waitress looks more suspicious every time she walks by, but she keeps refilling his coffee anyway, so Klaus thinks it must not be too bad.

It works until it doesn’t. Klaus is always like some kind of beacon for ghosts, they seem to find him by instinct alone, but today it’s turned up to eleven. By the time half of his food’s gone, there are sixteen normal ghosts in the diner, five shadow-demon-fucks, and Satan knows how many Ben-like ghosts milling about. Nonetheless, he determinedly keeps his ass parked in his seat until his food is gone, because he’s actually paying for this stuff, even though it gets harder and harder to focus the longer he’s there.

Eventually he throws down what he’s pretty sure is close enough to correct change on the table and all but flees when there are no ghosts blocking the exit.

He’s trembling before the cool air even hits his face, and Ben is walking alongside him even though he didn’t stand from the table when Klaus did. They walk, and Klaus smokes, and Ben talks, and Klaus tries to talk back every now and again. A couple times, Klaus runs when too many ghosts catch up to them at once.

He wonders, idly, if there are fewer ghosts out in the countryside. It’s possible, but the city ghosts would probably just follow him there, so he doesn’t mention it to Ben. He imagines it, though: somewhere that’s really nowhere, like _South Dakota._ He remembers someone from the night before talking about the Badlands, expansive and fake-looking, a whole dinosaur graveyard in the middle of nowhere. It sounds nice—empty.

Feeling hazy, Klaus floats through a liquor store, but the cashier tries to card him and then threatens to call the cops when he begs, so he leaves empty handed. It gets harder to focus as time goes on, and Klaus feels more and more like he’s trapped behind a thick wall of glass, small and unreal and muffled. Even wandering the whole city, he starts to feel claustrophobic. There are more dead people around than living, and the ones that are alive give him a wide berth and won’t meet his eyes.

And he gets it, he knows how crazy he looks on a good day, and today definitely is _not,_ but it makes him feel more like he’s dead too, just another ghost who doesn’t even know that’s what he is. It starts as a passing observation, an echo of Reginald from years ago saying _you are a bridge, Number Four, a missing link between life and death,_ and then a not-real _something_ rips its way harmlessly through his chest, and he doesn’t feel like he’s walking even though he was sure he was, he and Ben were walking, but he’s not actively moving his feet, he has no control over where they’re going, maybe he really _is_ just drifting and, God, it’s so loud, if he’s dead why is he in this _hell—_

“It’s okay,” Ben is saying, suddenly right in Klaus’s face. He’s talking fast and his eyes are wide. “It was just a ghost, it can’t touch you. Breathe, Klaus, it’s okay.”

“I can’t feel my feet,” he says, trying to explain, but then he notices that they’ve stopped moving in the middle of the sidewalk, and at least the sense of being flown like a kite has stopped.

“It’s just cold out,” Ben says, and some of the worry melts away from his face. “And your shoes suck.”

“Hey!” Klaus says. He looks down at his hightops, all thin fabric and uninsulated rubber, and wiggles his toes just to prove to himself that he has a body. He shudders at the disconnect he feels between giving the command and seeing his shoes move.

He looks around as he digs out another cigarette and finds himself in a decidedly shitty part of town. Standing there, he smokes two cigarettes and lets the small rush of nicotine ground him as people part to walk around him. He doesn’t own a watch, but it looks like afternoon, feels like it too.

Cora’s friend who’s throwing the party tonight does not live on this side of town, but that’s fine. He knows a few people in this neighborhood, and he starts looking for the right buildings.

Eventually, he finds Richard, who has no sense of humor and who goes by Richie and won’t answer to Dick, so that’s what everyone calls him behind his back. Dick’s not exactly a drug dealer, but he always has something on hand and is always willing to sell to Klaus because he thinks Klaus is more fun when he’s on at least three different things. Klaus smokes outside until someone leaves through the front door and then slips in before it can shut.

“Fuck off!” Dick yells when Klaus knocks on the front door to his apartment. Klaus laughs, loud and boisterous and _fun_ enough to be heard through the door.

“Trick or treat!” he sing-songs back.

Dick opens the door and raises an eyebrow, but he lets Klaus in, one arm holding the door open and the other holding his furious chihuahua, which is barking and growling in a way that’s startlingly similar to the used-to-be-a-ghost that’s been at his heels for the past twenty minutes. Klaus laughs as he dances in, but he tries to get it to sound more charming than hysterical.

“Happy Halloween,” Dick says, shutting the door and depositing the dog on the ground, where it immediately comes over to sniff Klaus’s pants and growl some more. It makes him feel brittle somehow. It’s already so _loud_ in Dick’s apartment.

“Hardly,” he says breezily, waving a hand dismissively and wandering farther into the living room. In what’s admittedly a wretched British accent, he adds, “Just dreadful, darling, really. I simply can’t stand it. Horribly tacky, if you ask me.”

Dick laughs, genuinely amused but with the condescending edge it always has. Klaus can just see Ben sulking in the corner, not looking thrilled to be here in the least, but whatever. Ben doesn’t like most (any, really) of Klaus’s friends.

“Really?” Dick asks. “I would’ve guessed you’d be all for this shit, man.”

“I hate it,” Klaus says cheerfully, and then flinches when a ghost screams so close to his face that its jaw slips through Klaus’s ear. “There’s a party on the West End tonight. Go with me?”

Dick rolls his eyes when Klaus bats his eyelashes, almost feeling bad for the sap. Dickie thinks he’s very smart, and he thinks everyone else thinks he’s very smart, and that this makes everyone want to be around him all the time. Sometimes it’s exhausting, but it provides an easy shortcut for getting drugs out of him. Very nifty when Klaus is exceedingly aware he’s on the clock. He’s only got so much time here before the number of ghosts drifting in through the walls makes it impossible to hear, or focus, or anything.

Klaus has never been able to take enough of anything to get the ghosts to shut up completely on Halloween, but if he can take the edge off now he might just make it to the party so he can survive until tomorrow. It’s like when someone on trial for murder is obviously guilty, and the defence’s goal stops being “prove them innocent” and becomes “avoid the death penalty.”

Dick hems and haws about the party, so Klaus asks after his fucking Mission Statement, a drafted personal philosophy that’s always in some new iteration, and Dick pours them both some whiskey and talks about the healing power of hallucinogens and the vacuum-sealed bag of mushrooms he’d been growing in his closet.

Starting to feel desperate and closed-in, Klaus starts to spin a manic yarn about social experiments and group gatherings and the mind-opening power of DMT. His view of Ben is blocked by the growing huddle of spirits in the room, but Klaus just knows he’s rolling his eyes as Dick leans forward, interested. One more compliment about his intellect, and he’s hooked. They drink some more whiskey and pop three tabs of acid each. Klaus makes it through two episodes of _Family Guy_ before the apartment becomes unbearable. He has no idea what time it is, but he says they better get going if they’re going to make it all the way to the West End. Klaus doesn’t realize until after Dick shoots him a long look that he’s yelling again.

To Klaus’s dismay, Dick doesn’t like to take public transport when he’s tripping, so they set off walking. It’s not quite as loud as before, and the lines on the sidewalk are definitely starting to waver as Klaus watches, but acid’s never been the most effective at blocking ghosts anyway, and there are just so _many._ God, maybe hallucinogens weren’t the way to get through today, but it’s what Dick always has. He tries to pretend the awful-looking ones are just so horrifying because of the visual effects.

Even so, he struggles to keep up, weaving and ducking around things only he can see while the edges of his body feel like they’re rising and retreating like the tide.

Dick gets sick of his shit halfway there, and they end up in a brief screaming match on the street that’s mostly Klaus’s fault. He ends up calling Dick a _dick,_ which always gets a rise out of him. He gets all up in Klaus’s face, but is luckily invested enough in his stupid personal mission that he takes his pacifism seriously, so Klaus ends up pocketing the DMT pen and Dick ends up storming off.

Ben had disappeared around the time Klaus had left Dick’s apartment, off to wherever it is he goes when he’s not with Klaus. He’d noticed at some point, in a dazed and far-off way, but he feels it acutely after Dick’s gone, the familiar feeling of alone-but-not-at-all-alone, of strange hands reaching for him through darkness even though they can’t touch.

He makes it to the party eventually, surprising even himself at remembering the address correctly. By the time he slips inside the house—a three-story monstrosity with peeling gray paint, grossness levels indicating a college house, cheaper than dorms and not nice enough to be a frat—he’s groaning to himself. He keeps stumbling into walls when the fast things dart at him.

“Three tabs,” he can practically hear Ben saying. “Not your brightest idea.”

Except, he realizes about a full minute too late, he actually heard Ben say that, because Ben’s here again, leaning against the far wall by the staircase, looking bizarrely like he belongs: petulant, hood up, sulking at a Halloween party. All he’s missing is the red Solo cup.

Klaus plays it off by pretending he’s not talking back because he’s at a party and there are all these other people around, even though the performance is mostly for himself.

He walks circuits until he finds the kitchen and pours himself a drink, and then a second. People keep saying hi, friendly and buzzed and happy, and Klaus puts effort into replying in kind even though it’s hard, and loud, and the room is spinning on a couple different axes. He keeps refilling his cup, hoping the alcohol will slow everything down, maybe quell the way his skin feels like slithery liquid over only slightly more solid bones.

At first, he doesn’t see Cora, but then she slams into him hard enough that he drops his plastic cup.

“Jesus, are you deaf?” she laughs, and she squeals in his ear as she hugs him—again, he realizes, because that squeal was _her_ a few seconds ago, presumably when she walked in. He should’ve picked up on it, he thinks dizzily. It’s a happy sound, obviously not the kind of noise a ghost usually makes. Everything’s overlapping though, just a bit, and the room’s gotten crowded in the time he’s been here, and he doesn’t think most of the figures are living.

There’s the sound of blood gushing and a knife going _shink,_ and he grimaces and casts a glance around for first Diego, and then someone getting murdered. There’s red, and people fighting, shouting, and a coffee table being flipped over, and it takes Klaus an embarrassingly long second to realize it’s a TV, a horror movie, and that he’s not in the kitchen anymore. There’s a small crowd gathered around a box TV, lounging here and there, and Klaus thinks most of them are living this time. He himself is leaning against the far wall with not-really-goth Cora, but he’s got a new cup with a new drink inside, and it’s not so crowded in here yet, which is nice.

The movie’s almost funny, but Klaus can hardly hear over the living conversation and the dead noise. He wants to ask someone to put subtitles on, but he doesn’t know who lives here, who to ask, and, anyway, he gets distracted looking around at the people by a ghost with a _machete,_ which is at least more fascinating than terrifying.

At some point, Cora’s elbow nudges him and he tilts his head to look at her.

“...doing...you out...I know…”

Klaus shakes his head.

“Sorry,” he says, pointing to his ear. “Wanna go somewhere else?”

She gives him a weird look that tells him he’s probably talking way too loudly, but she takes his hand and pulls him along, past a small group of people to say hi, and then up the stairs where Klaus almost rips his hand from hers when a legless ghost man balances in the middle of their path.

When they reach the roof, Klaus’s drink is full again, smelling mostly like gin and bubbling like there’s a splash of soda.

“You should really pay more attention to your drinks,” Ben would say if he were up here, but when Klaus looks around this time, his dead brother is nowhere to be seen.

There’s a slapdash fire pit built into the concrete of the roof, folding chairs arranged around it and a boombox plugged into an extension cord coming from inside. The tiniest fire flickers in the center of the hole, very cute-looking and reminding Klaus of Calcifer from _Howl’s Moving Castle._ There’s a brief punch of sorrow as Klaus’s mind casts back. The movie came out when they were fifteen, early in the summer, and Klaus and Allison had snuck out to see it with a couple of Allison’s friends, and afterwards they went to the closed-down opera house where Amber’s mom had worked and stolen one of the bottles of wine they sold during productions. Amber’s girlfriend had recited Shakespeare to them sloppily on the dark stage, and they’d laughed, and she’d explained to them even drunk off her ass that _The Lion King_ was just _Hamlet._

Out of all his siblings, he maybe misses Allison the most. Not that he didn’t—doesn’t—love his other siblings, or that they didn’t all have their own special relationships once upon a time, but Allison got things the others didn’t. Sure, Luther was protective of him on missions, pairing him up with Five so someone could keep an eye on him and keep him out of the more dangerous combat; and Diego was protective at home, pulling punches during training and yelling at Luther when he forgot; and Vanya used to let him sit on her floor and make up Russian lyrics to her violin music just so he could practice languages; and Ben used to let him have sleepovers after he’d have a nightmare; and somehow Five had been the only one who would match Klaus’s dark sense of humor, and they’d joke under their breath during the impromptu press conferences after missions until Ben cracked a smile. It was just—Allison was fun in the way that made Klaus feel normal. She’d liked rebelling and expressing herself and gossiping. 

To their credit, nobody else in the family ever really judged Klaus for the way he dressed or carried himself beyond the obvious comments on the practicalities—or lack thereof—of a certain pair of shoes or the sheerness of a shirt, but they didn’t play in the space with him either. Even Vanya, who was always pulling even with him in terms of crossing gender lines, who traded her skirt for his shorts when they were six, was always more confused by him than anything. As kids, she wanted the shorts so she could do cartwheels without flashing her underwear, and later, as they went through puberty and inched towards adulthood, she went for muted tones and large fits for much the same reason: they were more practical and comfortable. She couldn’t understand that Klaus would ditch the practicality that came with men’s “fashion,” even when he tried to explain that it wasn’t about _comfort_ so much as it was about having _fun._

Allison, though. She got it—why he would choose to look pretty or striking instead of blending into the background—and, more importantly, she was excited by it. The two of them had bonded over objects and trends and the very idea of being glamorous, had dressed up in heels and taught themselves how to do winged eyeliner and snuck out, whispering desperately about all the things they could do when they got away from the Academy.

It hadn’t worked out exactly the way they’d envisioned five years ago, but he’s _out,_ he supposes, and everything else will work out. He still misses his sister, though.

Cora’s nodding along, because Klaus apparently just told some or all of that story, and Klaus decides he’s said more embarrassing things.

“I haven’t seen that one,” she says, making a face. “My mom thought Studio Ghibli was creepy and kind of scary after she saw an ad for one of the movies, so I never really had them around growing up. I love _Lion King_ though.”

“Never seen it,” Klaus declares proudly, grinning because he knows she’s about to go _off._

She does, all indignant rage and sympathetic hurt, and Klaus just laughs. That one came out when they were actual kids, maybe five or six? Certainly before even he knew how to sneak out to the movies, and it wasn’t like Dad was going to pop in a film like that.

“Maybe he would’ve,” Klaus snickers, “if he’d known it was just _Hamlet.”_

“We should watch it,” Cora tells him with finality. And then, seriously, “I don’t know what Nate’s fucking problem is, but he’ll get over it. God, I can’t believe he kicked you out.”

Klaus shrugs, trying to reach back and get the easy atmosphere.

“He wasn’t the first,” he says dismissively. “Won’t be the last.”

Cora bites her lip and stares at him, all sad, focusing more on his words than his tone.

“Maybe you could stay here?” she suggests. “They’re like halfway through the semester but I think someone dropped out last week. Didn’t tell anybody, just like...packed his shit and moved back to Texas.”

Cora’s nice, and ~~naive~~ innocent, and he’s remembering why that’s sometimes more difficult to deal with.

Klaus stares at the cute fire.

“Maybe,” he says.

“I think the place is usually only for students but they’re freaking out because they’ll be short on rent next month,” she says, almost visibly warming to the idea. “You’d have to get a job, but I don’t think it’s much with how many people live here.”

Klaus watches as a ghost in a long, prairie-days dress reenacts walking off the edge of the building, and forcibly turns off the part of his brain that wants to think of a way to make that happen. He’s glad Ben didn’t follow them up so he can’t get his spirits up (pun decidedly not intended).

Maybe it would be possible. Maybe it would even be fun. He could get a job, distract his housemates from their homework, he could borrow their books and then leave them open under paperweights in his room so Ben could read them, a page at a time. He could show Cora _Howl’s Moving Castle_ and she could show him _The Lion King_ and he could maybe even learn to cook.

Maybe, maybe, maybe, he thinks, and then he stops thinking.

First, he needs to make it until the sun comes up. Everything else comes after.

“So you were a Disney kid, huh?” he asks instead. “Please tell me you went through a phase where you copied Disney Channel fashion. I dare you.”

Cora laughs, and she packs a bowl for them, and it’s a breath of fresh air. Klaus breathes deeply, and they chat, and they smoke. The weed doesn’t do anything to the potency of the acid, but he looks at the cool way the small flames twist for a while as the crossfade overlays the trip.

It’s not long enough, though. Suicide ghost reenacts her death four times before she gets impatient with him, getting in his face and yelling. She’s not even asking for anything, just explaining herself very poorly, screaming about how he doesn’t understand, why won’t he listen, she had to, why hadn’t anybody _listened?_

“Oh, I think I get it,” Klaus mutters darkly, chipping away at his fingernail polish.

Other entities find him up there, too. All through the one-person play and Cora’s dopy, meandering stories, other things find their way onto the roof. The ledge starts to look dangerously appealing, so he offers himself a compromise.

“I’m getting so sleepy,” he complains, over-loud and overdramatic, slumping in his lawn chair. “I feel like I’m gonna konk out and miss the whole holiday!”

“Technically,” Cora says with a shit-eating grin, “the holiday’s over in about an hour.”

“Pish-posh!” he says, flailing his arms. “Everyone knows the festivities don’t even _start_ till midnight!”

She laughs, and in Klaus’s soft-edged mind it comes across as impossibly fond. God, he loves her. If he ever does manage to get a job, he thinks he’d move in with her. They could have a fireplace and sit around it just like this, every night.

“Does anybody here have any goodies to keep the party goin?” he asks, and he’s slid so far down that he twists so his shoulders are cradled by one armrest, a knee slung over the other.

“Pretty sure I saw some Red Bull in the fridge,” she says, all innocence and earnestness.

“You hate me,” Klaus groans.

It’s more of a snicker than a laugh that comes out of Cora this time, based on her expression, scrunched up and mischievous, but it’s getting hard to hear again. A shadow leaps up from _underneath_ the fire, and it screams in a way that reminds Klaus of emergency sirens. Cora’s already rocking unsteadily to her feet, though.

“C’mon,” she says, “let’s go find Jessica.”

Klaus thinks he might actually be in love with Cora.

***

Jessica’s a resident of the house, and the person who invited Cora to the party in the first place. She’s as tall as Klaus, and amazingly curvy in physique, showing it off with the long, form-fitting black dress with one of the deepest necklines he’s ever seen on someone whose nipples are illegal. The effect is only a little offset by the plastic vampire teeth she flashes at them in a grin and the boxy hipster glasses sitting on her nose.

Klaus gushes about how stunning she is, all while leaning against Cora to avoid ruffling any feathers. He talks, and then Cora talks, and Jessica replies, all friendly banter and curiosity. (Klaus is finally starting to get the rhythm of friend drug deals, because it’s very different from the in-and-out handoffs he’s used to in back alleys.)

It’s louder inside, but it’s also loud. There’s still canned shrieks coming from the movie marathon in the living room, and at least two distinct sources of music, the fucking “Monster Mash” from their left and some grimy dubstep from above their heads. It’s enough that no one stares at him when he has to lean in and yell-ask, “What?”

Eventually, Cora gets to the point. Or, she hints at the point, but Jessica picks up on it right away.

“What’re you looking for?” she asks.

“Something to keep the party going,” Cora replies. “I’m not super picky.”

“Yes.” Klaus nods in a way that he thinks might qualify as _sagely._ “You see, I’m very serious about my career, little lady. Early to bed, early to rise, all the worms are yours, et cetera et cetera.”

“He’s only here ’cause I begged him,” Cora says. Klaus nods again, trying to look stern and scholarly. “Favorite holiday and all that.”

“It’s like she’s invited me to Christmas dinner,” he says. “And I can hardly stay awake!”

Jessica looks amused, but she gives them a once-over that feels more assessing.

“Wait here,” she tells them. “I’ll be right back.”

Ah, smart girl, Klaus thinks. He wonders if she’s the house dealer, if the stash is kept in her bedroom or hidden in a closet, or if she just knows whoever else to talk to. Which...yeah, is probably the point, playing it close to her chest and whatever.

They’d found her sneaking a cigarette in a small bedroom with a literal bunk bed pushed up against the wall. She’d been kneeling on it and blowing smoke out the window as she’d scribbled in a spiral-bound notebook. While they wait, Klaus dons the sheer black cape hanging from the top bunk, steals a smoke from the pack abandoned pack, and lights it with the lighter next to it, crawling onto the thin-as-fuck mattress so he can blow at least most of the smoke outside, courteous houseguest that he is. Cora follows him, and two ghosts faze through the wall, screaming at both each other and Klaus.

He can feel his teeth grinding together inside his skull, tensing the muscles in his jaw and neck, and it’s like there’s an invisible string tied between those and the nerves down his shoulders and chest. Like a swift elbow to the nose, it hits him just how tired he is. His head is pounding, and everything vaguely hurts in a way he just knows would go away if he could sleep for three days straight, or even just one night. He doesn’t even need a full eight hours, just...six would do. Six hours of sleep would be perfect, would be more than he thinks he’s gotten in weeks.

_”Klaus!_

Flinching, he blinks reality back into focus around him, but it’s only one of the ghosts, road rash covering half of his face and a good portion of his torso looking suspiciously pancake-y. The other is—well, they’re brothers, Klaus guesses through the numbing buzz of substances and discomfort; the only kind of people who can look at each other with so much hatred and still follow one another around are the kind who are related. He has a single, bright moment of missing Diego so much it hurts, and then switches to idly wondering where Ben’s wandered off to. The second brother—blocking the only door to the room, which makes Klaus feel sick, even though he can walk through them, even though they’re on the ground floor and there’s a window at his back—has glass jutting out from his skin, freely bleeding as he moves. There’s a patchwork of tears in the skin on his face that looks like a spiderweb-cracked mirror, and more blood falls from his lips when he opens his mouth to snarl. It twists and curls and shimmers through the air.

Klaus turns away abruptly, taking a desperately deep drag that serves both to regulate his breathing and give him the comforting hit of nicotine. When he settles again, he sees Cora, staring at Jessica’s notebook where she tossed it on the pillow, bulging slightly where a pen’s marking the page. Feeling guilty over having forgotten she was there for a second, Klaus offers her the cigarette with raised eyebrows. When she re-notices him, she smiles with a pinch between her eyebrows, looking guilty and turning her back on the pillow. She takes the cigarette, their fingers just barely brushing in the handoff.

While she turns around to face the window, taking the baby puff-puff-puffs of someone trying their hardest not to cough, Klaus makes a face that only makes his headache worse. Cora’s sharp and has a fast wit, but even though she makes a big show out of pretending to be innocent...she really _is._ At least compared to Klaus. She’s got some sketchy friends right now, and loves wearing steel-toed combat boots and carrying a switchblade, but she’s also just a kid. At nineteen, the worst things to ever happen to her were her parents’ divorce and the car crash that killed her cousin when she was in eighth grade. Klaus feels almost skeevy when she blushes or looks at him Like That, like she _wants._ It’s incongruous with the way pancake-man’s intestines ooze out the bottom of his shirt, spilling from where his skin ruptured and his bones were smashed to smithereens.

_You’re better than this,_ he imagines telling her. He could be sweet long enough to break it to her, he’s pretty sure, even though everyone he grew up with calls him brash and clumsy, tactless.

He keeps it to himself, though, because his siblings were always right about him being selfish at least. Cora’s smart, and going through a rebellious phase, but she still knows Klaus is no good. Bringing it up would just mean she has to acknowledge it. Instead, he takes the cigarette back and nods at the notebook.

“Is your dealer a nerd?” he asks skeptically. “Was she really hiding out and doing homework in the middle of her own Halloween party?”

“Maybe,” she says, looking back down at the notebook as if it’s the briefcase from _Pulp Fiction._ Klaus looks at it, squints. Looks back at Cora looking at it.

When he reaches for it, Cora snatches it up, held close but not quite to her chest. Klaus wheezes out a laugh.

“She’s a writer,” Cora says quickly, like that’s going to make Klaus not want to take a peek. “She writes poetry.”

“Is she any good?” Klaus asks, delighted.

“I don’t _know,”_ Cora says in dismay. “She’s always writing it, though. She has to be, right? _At least_ ten thousand hours.”

Klaus has no idea what time has to do with any of it—poetry’s just one of those _things,_ isn’t it? You either have a knack for it or you don’t, like math, or vocal pitch—but he delights in the new game, playfully trying to wrestle the notebook away from Cora and putting his back to the ghosts in the process.

He loses when a ghost with a mess of teeth, protruding from his mouth and gums and _cheek_ jumps at him through her chest. If it’s able to say words in that condition, Klaus doesn’t hear them, too busy yelping and throwing himself backwards and _away._. He lands on his shoulder, head glancing off the hardwood floor with a sharp knock that inexplicably sends a wave of relief through the buzz of the headache, and Cora just crows at her victory, holding her prize aloft as road-hamburger ghost towers over her, sticking halfway through the top bunk awkwardly and invisibly dripping his scrambled flesh onto her knee and hand.

“Oh shit,” Cora says suddenly, notebook still held above her head.

For a brief moment Klaus thinks she can see the walking corpses, but no. Her eyes don’t seem to be catching on the right spots, and she’s looking through his torso. A fourth ghost—normal-looking save for the horrific scream her face seems to be frozen in—fizzles blue a moment later as Jessica walks through the threshold. She’s smiling, bemused, as Cora slowly lowers her arm and Klaus rocks up to a sitting position on the floor, and—oh, yep, _there’s_ the headache again.

“Hey,” Jessica says, eyes sweeping the scene. Klaus sees the cigarette abandoned on the bedding where it’s eye-level with him, bent and dead-looking, but he takes it anyway, and stubs it out on the metal frame just to be safe before dropping it to the ground.

“Hey,” Cora says.

“Madame Boheme,” Klaus says, taking pity on the both of them and bowing as grandly as he can to Jessica from the floor. “I hear you’re a wordsmith! How could you keep such a secret from me?”

The ice breaks. Jessica tries to wave them off, saying it’s just something she does for herself, and Klaus spills the beans that Cora is practically dying to hear it. Jessica changes the subject by pulling out a ziplock bag with smaller baggies inside, and Klaus releases a breath that tells him just how tensely he’s been holding himself. They each take a pill, pressed with the vague shape of a cartoonish ghost that makes Klaus snort to himself, and Jessica pulls out a tiny square mirror from the ziplock so they can do lines of coke while they wait for the other stuff to kick in. Cora comes up from her second line already making a face, and she sticks her tongue out in disgust.

“Okay,” she says, “fuck this. I need a drink.”

Jessica laughs as she takes the mirror back and uses a razor to scrape the remaining coke into a couple tiny bumps. She does one, and hands the mirror off to Klaus, who takes it gladly. His own lines are kicking in even as he bows his head, and it all feels nice and downright friendly. Cora had taken out her wallet and passed some bills off to Jessica when the ziplock first came out, not even looking in Klaus’s direction, so it’s not even costing him anything. And it doesn't feel weird that Jessica’s partaking with them either. There’s a certain kind of dealer that usually joins the party, of course, the kind that does their business in their living rooms, seated on their stained couches or their equally-as-stained carpets in front of a coffee table that seems to be functioning more as an ashtray than anything else. Klaus doesn’t know why exactly this is different, if he’s just feeling good from the chemical cocktail in his blood, but he suspects it’s a few different things. 

For one, Klaus hasn’t had all that many women dealers, and he thinks that might be part of it. He’s not the biggest fan of thinking of people in such black-and-white ways—good/bad, prude/slut, fun/narc, male/female—but to forcefully ignore labels would be downright dangerous at times. At least on a couple of separate occasions, he’s had Male-with-a-capital-M dealers do lines with him, on those scraggly carpets in their musty living rooms before he’s even proven he has money, and no matter how much he has on him, there’s that fake sympathy-hissing sound they make when they pull in air through their teeth right before they name a price just barely above the amount of cash in his hands. He tries to remember, now, to ask for the prices up front, but that doesn’t fix the issue of their personalities. Even with precautions taken, sometimes it’s hard to leave when dealers just keep talking and sitting on the floor and not kicking him out, but he’s getting better at it.

It’s nice to have a break from that, even if just for tonight while he feels stretched so thin. He relaxes into the coke, light on his feet and nearly floating from the weed as they propel themselves into the kitchen. Cora hands him another red Solo cup, and he realizes it’s some vaguely shitty beer when he feels the carbonation on his tongue.

He thinks the other reason it feels different is because this is a college house, a college party. Not everyone here is actively enrolled in school, of course, but Cora and Jessica are. And Klaus has never been _in_ college, or in school at all if you want to get technical about it, but he’s hung out with enough college kids that he’s starting to understand it.

The dealers with the dingy living rooms are in the real world, and that’s the role they’ve chosen for themselves or fallen into. It’s just who they are. But these people in school, they’re still waiting to be cast, trying on parts for size, playing in wardrobe and learning lines. College is a weird, temporary bubble for people, away from their families for the first time and, for lack of a better word, experimenting. For most of these people, drug dealing and partying won’t be such a huge part of their lives after they graduate. They’re _playing_ at it, dipping their toes in and having fun, but not committing. It’s strange, to think he’s the same age as most of these people, or younger even. He feels like he’s simultaneously behind them, stunted and clueless about how the world works, and eons ahead of them, some of the things he’s seen and lessons learned the hard way making them look like children from certain angles.

Ugh, the mix he’s on is making him philosophical. Well, if he’s going to be waxing poetic anyway…

“Come on!” he says, and he turns with a flourish. He doesn’t remember which room they just came from, but the couple of ghosts lingering through the open door tip him off, and he ducks in just long enough to grab Jessica’s notebook, stick the pen behind his ear after it falls out, and pocket her pack.

“We need better atmosphere,” he explains, waving the notebook. Jessica reaches for it, and he dances back, striding away confidently despite having no idea where he’s going. Just, away from where they were. The hallways are narrow, and he veers a couple times to avoid having to walk through a ghost (though Cora waves at one of them, so Klaus thinks it might just be a convincing costume), but eventually he leads them to a back door. There’s an overgrown backyard, and a squat concrete porch with two steps leading down, glowing in a diffuse light coming from a round light above the door.

Satisfied and quite proud of the atmosphere he’s found, he releases the notebook to Jessica and sits on the grass at the foot of the steps, facing the door expectantly. Cora grins and joins him, tucking herself into his side. Jessica stands on the top step, eyes wide, a comical look of horror on her face.

“You _suck,”_ she tells Klaus.

“I know,” Klaus replies, giddy. Cora wiggles in excitement.

“You really don’t wanna hear it,” Jessica says desperately.

Klaus waves her off. She waffles for a few more minutes, but Klaus is focused for once, and he can be persuasive when he wants to be. He assures her that he wouldn’t know good poetry from bad poetry if his life depended on it, and that Cora’s the least judgmental person alive, highlighting the fact with a story of how she found him so stoned he thought was a ghost, how she’d tried to convince him otherwise, and then had had to walk him through the concept of having a body and existing in a meatsack like an animal, though the concepts of sex and gender had been incomprehensible for hours, and he’d ended up sobbing over it. Everyone laughs, and Jessica stops holding the notebook like it’s a timebomb.

Jessica reads. Klaus wasn’t exactly lying—he has no idea if it’s any good in a technical sense. Sure, Dad made them read classic literature when they were kids, epics in the original Greek, but it was more as a way to get them to understand the structure of language, word roots, and open the doors to even more languages. It was one of the few areas of their education that Klaus excelled in, and he remembers himself and Five giggling over all the different Greek words for _murder_ and _death._

This, though. Jessica’s poetry. He feels like a schluts even saying it, but it’s deep in a way he never felt from Homer’s _Odyssey._ There are metaphors and feelings and the words come together to paint pictures behind his eyes. Maybe it’s the acid and the coke, hijacking his imagination and making it so vivid, or maybe it’s just actually good writing, but the words tug at him. (Maybe it’s the poetry, because Cora has tears in her eyes at one point, transfixed.)

There are poems about sex, and about the self, and about selfishness and pain and peace and even one about parrots. Some poems are a couple stanzas long while others span two or three pages. Klaus and Cora cheer and whoop when appropriate, _ooh_ and _ahh_ when it’s not. There’s a poem that’s a story about fucking in the stacks at a library during finals week, charged and hysteric and fatalistic, and Klaus looks around for Ben, thinking that, for once, it’s something they would both like, but Ben’s still MIA. Whatever, he’ll just have to remember it as best he can.

The awe and interest sour into frustration and anger and something startlingly close to grief as ghosts show up. He tries to pay attention, he really does, but the armless teenager in Depression-era clothing distracts him from the description of _tipping my head, letting the sunlight pour down my ear._ He starts missing things through the screaming, slipping through reality and clinging to the bits he can hear.

The yard populates as the minutes drag on, hissing and threats coming from the darkness behind Klaus. Jessica sits on the step as they crowd around like children, Klaus trying to get close enough to hear and Cora following for his body heat. He starts wiping at his earlobe, convinced it’s bleeding from the wall of pure sound crashing like waves.

More than just scary or annoying, it _hurts._ His head hurts somewhere beyond the fuzz in his body, and his fucking soul hurts. He likes these people, he likes the poetry and sitting on the grass as the party goes on inside. He wants to cry with how unfair it is, but that’s never done him any good before and seems pointless now. And he felt so _good_ before.

He shivers and blue fingers appear in front of his nose, from behind where a man is trying to strangle him, spitting curses and screaming his name. He shudders a second time, the chill taking hold of his vertebrae and shaking out his spine like a dusty rug. It effectively shrugs Cora off, and Klaus slams his eyes shut. He hasn’t counted, but there are at least two dozen spirits in the space around them now, _have_ to be.

Cora’s hand on his arm nearly makes him scream himself. She’s looking at him as Jessica pauses the reading to scribble feverishly on a blank page. He can’t hear whatever Cora says to him. He scrambles for the money in his shoe, trying to take out only half of it and fumbling, ending up gathering his bills from the grass. Half goes in his pocket, half stays in his fist.

“Yoohoo,” he croons, keeping his volume down. Jessica doesn’t look up, and he has to tug on her dress and wait for her to blink down at him as he holds out the money with a hopeful expression. Criss-cross on the ground, he grits his teeth and bounces his knees like butterfly wings as he waits some more for her to root around for her ziplock. Then he’s got a baggie of coke and two more tablets, which he shoves in his other pocket as he stands.

Cora says something, and she’s frowning when Klaus turns back, and there’s an old man grinning down at her, watching raptly, fat and bald and literally _drooling_ over her head.

“I’ll fucking ruin her,” he promises Klaus when he notices the audience. The ghost’s shoulders heave like he’s panting. “She’s sweet, I’ll bet she cries. It’s always better when they cry. I’ll have her, I’ll—”

Klaus’s stomach twists, and in the next breath he waves her off lazily.

“Places to go, people to see,” he says. “Besides, if I leave you two lovebirds can finally start making out in the spooky moonlight.”

Cora blanches, and Klaus uses the moment of embarrassment to step around Jessica and duck inside. He bustles through, opening doors and dodging ghosts until he finds the bathroom, where he shuts himself inside. He clears off and dries a corner of the counter, dumps some of the powder out, and uses one of his twenty dollar bills to first make lines and then snort them. He swallows one of the tablets with water from the sink and then takes a piss. It’s loud in the house, music and laughter and fake screaming mingling with the real screaming, but for the moment, it’s quieter than the yard had been. Over the ambient party sounds, the light tinkling as he focuses on emptying his bladder, and his uneven breathing, another rhythm joins, fast breaths, huffing and whistling.

“I want her,” growls the ghost from the yard. Klaus jumps, stream stuttering to a stop.

“Fuck,” he mutters, closing his eyes and tucking his dick back in his pants.

He washes his hands without opening his eyes, making himself ignore the ghost and letting the water run for a minute, the silky ribbon of water comforting. The ghost continues, as vulgar as Jessica’s poetry but without the knack for imagery, until Klaus gets livid even through his discomfort.

“Fuck off,” he bites out, looking right at it. The ghost has a receding hairline, permanent pit stains through his button-down, a beer belly. His lips stretch into a smile when Klaus acknowledges him, and starts talking again.

Klaus growls, but he feels tears prickling in his eyes. He rips the baggie back out of his pocket and barely remembers to dry his hands before swallowing the other pill dry and snorting a few more lines. He’s grinning forcefully when he straightens, his skin electric and hot. He feels manic as he throws open the bathroom door, and he finds a dancefloor spilling out of someone’s bedroom on his way to get another drink.

He lets himself get distracted, moving to the music, and he takes a guess at one of the men, sidles up to him and steals a messy gulp from his drink. The man blinks, sweaty and clueless, but grins and keeps dancing and lets Klaus sneak a sip every couple minutes when the dregs of coke drip down the back of his throat.

The right guy finds Klaus eventually, hands on Klaus’s hips from behind. He hums happily. The hands spin him around, and he laughs. It’s wonderful, kaleidoscopic, the music and the movement and the bursts of cool air when someone breathes on him. It’s not quite fun, but it is freeing. For a while, Klaus feels alive, like he’s part of this, the party and the people, in love with everything, and he can almost forget that he’s got one foot in the grave.

The ghosts find him, and the sound scale tips away from party noises to anguished ones. Before it gets as bad as before, he grabs the guy’s hand and tugs insistently toward the door. They end up in someone else’s bedroom, a mattress on the floor amid piles of clothes, and Klaus pushes the man’s shoulders when he sinks down on top of Klaus on the bed. His heart is pounding a staccato beat in his throat, limbs trembling minutely, and it’s oppressively hot. Smoothly, the man rolls off to the side and Klaus follows to meet him in the middle.

Klaus touches, and giggles, and sinks-sinks- _sinks_ into the feeling of fingertips and fingernails and stubble and skin skating past his nerve endings, amplified and sweet as it currently is. He begs himself to get lost in it, and then actually, miraculously does.

When he comes back to himself it’s like a rubber band snapping into place. It’s loud and hot and crowded and _he can’t breathe—_

His body doesn’t respond, at first, when he tries to push away, to open his eyes, anything to get his bearings. Something must get across between his panic and the adrenaline creeping through his blood, because the hands pause, holding instead of petting, and the change kickstarts Klaus. He flops back very unsexily onto—a blanket, he’s on a bed, right. A house. The ceiling is in front of and above him simultaneously because he’s lying on his back.

It’s Anthony above him. All at once, Klaus’s eyes are open and he’s gasping, and it’s Anthony holding himself up on his elbows between Klaus and the ceiling. Anthony, who Klaus used to sleep with last year, sneaking out of the Academy and as high on freedom as some of the stuff he’d been trying for the first time.

“Anthony?” he gasps, just to make sure. The face looking down at him is swirled, just a bit. The bridge of his nose is moving, and the arch of his eyebrows unfamiliar. He snorts then, and _that’s_ familiar at least.

“Hey, Klaus,” he says. There’s a pause, but when Klaus doesn’t immediately fill it, Anthony says, “You good?”

Klaus closes his eyes, assesses, but he gets lost almost immediately. He’s lost at sea, bobbing on sickening waves of sun-hot water, salt drawing all the moisture from his blood.

“S’really hot,” he says, dragging his eyes back open.

Anthony gives him a considering look, another pause to see if Klaus cracks a joke and shakes it off, but when he doesn’t, Anthony sighs and pushes himself up. Klaus watches him knee-walk across the floor mattress and almost fall as he leans far enough over to drag the window open. Klaus rolls onto his side, and pushes himself up, scooting over until he’s leaning back against the wall, some instinct in him compelling him to draw even with the window, and he’s rewarded by a blissfully cool current of air hitting his sweaty face.

“So...how's the boyfriend?” Klaus says, biding his time (and genuinely curious; Anthony started locking Klaus out because things had been getting _serious)._

“Eh,” Anthony says. “He got busted.”

He keeps Anthony talking for a while, stories and bitching, and Klaus fazes around through reality. It’s not zoning out, really, because he’s on too many uppers. It’s like the hum of fixating on a task without anything specific to focus on. His thoughts spin and reach, far flung and short lived. Like Ben’s tentacles, Klaus thinks suddenly when he catches sight of Ben by one of the walls. Klaus and Anthony are making out again, but Klaus is distracted enough to have his eyes open, doing a quick headcount of their invisible audience from his periphery and trying to estimate how much longer he has until he has to relocate. And suddenly Ben’s there, hood up and lips pursed in discomfort and something sour. Klaus waves a discreet hello, but doesn’t break away from what he’s doing, and Ben leaves again pretty quickly. There aren’t many lines left in the sand between Klaus and Ben, but this is one that’s at least partially intact.

Klaus overheats again, but Anthony doesn’t really notice when Klaus tries to get his attention. To be fair, Klaus doesn’t do a very good job, suddenly dizzy within his own fiery skin.

“Klaus!” someone says. Klaus’s ears are ringing. Wait, scratch that, start over:

“Klaus!” ten different people say, except one of them puts a hot palm to his neck and he gasps, eyes opening wide.

It’s just Anthony. Or, it’s just Anthony who’s touching him. The others are ghosts, a couple looking over Anthony’s shoulder, one swiping through Klaus’s chest, all yelling for him.

“Jesus,” Anthony says, drawing Klaus’s attention again. “Are you okay?”

“Yar’mror ke ee,” a ghost with a mostly missing jaw snarls, leaning forward. _“I’kee you!”_

“What?” Klaus says.

“You passed out,” Anthony says, more exasperated than anything else. He takes his hand off of Klaus’s neck. “What the fuck, man? You good?”

His heart thuds painfully in his chest, a heavy, demanding thing.

“I am accelerated,” Klaus declares slowly.

“Ah,” Anthony says, as if that makes complete sense. “Everything happens so much?”

Klaus goes to wave the comment away, but mostly his hand flops against the blanket underneath him.

“Too many uppers,” he explains.

Anthony shoots him a look, and Klaus’s eyes flutter as he waits for the man to size him up.

“Wanna equalize?” Anthony offers eventually, and Klaus grins through the crowd forming around them.

“Thought you’d never ask.”

***

It’s the sounds that wake Klaus up. His head _hurts_ over the onslaught of wailing, and beeping, and scuffing shoes, and the high-pitched ringing in his ears. His groan gets caught between his ribs on the way out, stutters and wheezes as his stomach muscles cramp around nothing, and that hurts too, his stomach.

“Shit,” he tries to say, though it doesn’t exactly come out clearly. The single word scrapes against his throat, which doesn’t so much hurt as ache with how dry and tender it is. He scrunches up his face in an attempt to externalize his discomfort without speaking again and—is that a hair in his nose? Something’s in his nose. Or on his nose?

Moving his hands seems like too much trouble, but after a few seconds of irritation he finds the right muscles to slowly rock his head and, _yes,_ there is definitely something right under his nose, and he can feel it on his cheeks when he moves. His headache flares at the shift in position, burning throbs that tell him to _lie still._

He might drift back off at some point, but he stays still for a while after he wakes again. The sounds keep rising and falling, jarring him back to himself, and the throbbing spreads from his head to his everything, and the _stupid fucking thing_ under his nose is bothering him to hell and back.

Keeping his head very still, he reaches up and feels a kind of muted vindication when he proves that, yes, there really is something on his face. The nerve endings in his fingertips are humming with numbness, and the movement is so uncoordinated that he catches his fist against his jaw, but the thing feels like a tube from an aquarium pump, smooth and plastic but not rigid.

_”Klaus,_ I said leave it alone, okay?”

At first, Klaus only hears the sharp note of his name and scrunches his nose. It’s the loudest one, but there are others already, murmurs and pleas that sound far away. The rest of the sentence filters in slowly and Klaus realizes, oh, not a ghost, that’s Ben’s voice.

But, then, that’s not quite right either, is it? Because Ben’s dead, so he’s a ghost now too. There’s a moment of pure confusion, the equation not adding up, but then it makes sense again. Ben’s dead, but he’s not like the others.

“Klaus,” Ben groans, except not.

No, fuck, that one isn’t Ben. A different ghost.

Klaus has the sneaking suspicion that he’s going to have to open his eyes to deal with this morning. There’s an equally urgent whisper in his head telling him he might want to just go back to sleep. He tries, for a couple minutes, just to see if it’ll happen on its own, if he’ll slip back beneath the wave of darkness away from the discomfort humming through his nerves, but of course he doesn’t. Everything’s loud and irritating, from the distant shuffling sounds to his dry mouth to the varying chatter of ghosts and people.

Peeling his eyes open _sucks._ His head pounds and his stomach churns, and the sight he’s rewarded with is all offwhite underneath fluorescent light, harsh and ugly.

“Klaus!” someone shouts, but it’s not Ben, and it’s too screechy to make sense coming from a living person, at least in response to him resigning himself to wakefulness.

Klaus, feeling wretched and weak and _small,_ can’t help the whimper he lets loose, squinting into the light.

“You’re okay,” Ben says, very quietly, very sadly. Klaus has to roll his head to the side to see him sitting hunched in the windowsill, hands stuffed into his pockets and eyes unfocused. If he didn’t know better he would think Ben had been crying, but ghosts can’t cry, he’s pretty sure. Of course, they can wail and sob, but Klaus has never seen tears from a ghost unless they died like that, and then they spend their afterlives with salty tracks cutting down their faces.

Either way, Ben looks tired and beaten himself under the cutting light. With his eyes mostly open, Klaus can see the something on his own face, just enough to be there. He catches sight of another tube, then, and tracks it to his forearm. All at once, the beeping sounds filter back in and make sense.

“Fuck,” he breathes, a shiver pushing through his skeleton.

The goddamn _hospital._

Ben doesn’t say anything else, just curls his shoulders more and continues to stare at nothing.

Klaus, for his part, gets himself all worked up. He hates hospitals. They’re one of the worst places in the world as far as he’s concerned, after cemeteries, hanging trees, and old prisons. He’s been to a few hospitals in his time, after missions gone haywire either as a patient or to visit a sibling. Normally when they got hurt, they’d get treated at home by Mom, but there were certain procedures the Academy wasn’t equipped to deal with, and when they got hurt on missions where people were watching or cameras were rolling, Reginald usually got them treated publicly too. Klaus even had to get his stomach pumped once last winter, shortly after Diego had fucked off and Luther had become even _worse,_ when Klaus spent a whole weekend away with various friends, drinking nonstop just to stay away from the Academy for a while. Even then, though, he’d been mostly awake and aware the entire time.

He must’ve fucked up bigtime last night.

There’s a persistent itch over the entire surface of his body that signals that he needs to get out of here, away from this place, be anywhere else. Unfortunately, he doesn’t feel up to sneaking out, doubts he could even if he could find the motivation.

Eventually, a nurse comes in to check on his IV and fiddle with the machines. He grins at her, cracks a joke, but she proves impervious to his charms.

“Can you tell me what you took?” she asks, which sounds like a trap if Klaus ever heard one.

“You know, it’s all a little fuzzy?” he says innocently, blinking up at her. He can see Ben shift out of the corner of his eye.

“Anything you could tell us would be useful,” she says.

For some reason, the statement rankles. Irritation flashes hot in his gut. Why won’t she just _play along?_ Then he could get out of here, and she wouldn’t have to deal with him anymore.

“Maybe I got possessed,” he says flippantly. “I remember something about a Ouija board in the basement.”

_”Just tell her!”_ Ben roars. When Klaus glances at him, Ben’s leaning forward, hands gripping the edge of the sill. His eyes are wide and his jaw clenched.

“Whoever dropped you off last night flew the coop right away,” she continues, not harshly and not kindly. It reminds Klaus of Five in the worst way, the tone he would take when he said something particularly devastating. “You were treated with Narcan as a precaution, but for the most part we’ve been giving you fluids and supplemental oxygen.” Her eyes are fixed on him steadily, the same way Five’s would when Klaus was bullshitting him. Ben starts talking fast and low, outburst over, talking fast about doctor-patient confidentiality and promising they won’t call the cops on him. When Klaus looks at him again, Ben looks scared and young and Klaus hates himself. And meanwhile, the other ghost from before screams his name and the nurse continues, “Certain drugs have compounds to counteract them, and certain drugs can have reactions with others. If we’re going to treat you we need to know what you took.”

And so Klaus, tired and aching and worn, tells her. Alcohol, weed, E, acid, coke.

“Okay,” the nurse says, softer than she’s spoken yet. Her eyes are off him finally, too, thank God. She got out a pad of sticky notes and a pen after the third substance.

“Ketamine, I’m pretty sure,” Ben mumbles.

“Ketamine?” Klaus says in surprise. Ben’s eyes are wide and he’s leaning forward like he can will Klaus into doing and saying the right things. He looks relieved, determined, if still tired and tense.

“Ketamine?” the nurse echoes, tracking Klaus’s gaze to the window and back. Ben presses his lips together and Klaus looks back at her, grins.

“Ketamine,” he says, not remembering that at all but trusting Ben more than himself.

She asks a couple more questions, makes a note on his chart, gets him some water, and then leaves. It’s quiet then. Or, not quiet, because it’s early afternoon-ish (Klaus thinks) the day after Halloween, and he’s not the only person who got into trouble last night, and it’s a hospital and hence full of spirits, but Ben turns morose again, still and watchful, and Klaus breathes through the nausea and the headache and the void opening up in him, past the noise from machines and the increasing screaming.

“Ketamine?” he asks eventually, not really even wanting the answer, but wanting to bring Ben back from however far he’s fallen into his head.

“You were with Anthony.” Ben shrugs. “You’d been snorting something. Most likely option.”

Klaus nods thoughtfully, which is an awkward movement when he’s lying on his back. It’s probable; Anthony’s always got ketamine on him.

“Anthony give me a lift to this hellhole?” Klaus asks, aiming for joking and falling flat.

Ben stares at him, hard, and then breaks away abruptly, scooting farther into the window and turning to look down at the street. Klaus braces for a lecture he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to handle.

“You couldn’t hear me,” Ben confesses quietly. The fear is back in his voice, and Klaus wishes desperately he could run away right now, but it feels like there’s lead in his blood. “To be fair, I don’t think you could hear anyone by the time I found you, but...you _couldn’t hear me.”_

Klaus wants to scream. Not at Ben, he doesn’t think. Just—scream, at the unfairness of the whole thing.

_I’m sorry you’re stuck with me_ and _please stop watching me; we both know what I’m doing and I don’t want you to watch me die_ and _I’ve had a foot in the grave since I was born_ and _it wasn’t supposed to be you who died on a mission._

_I’m sorry,_ he wants to scream. _Stop watching me, stop having hope so I can go up in flames already._

_You don’t deserve this!_

Instead, he tries to gather some saliva in his mouth because it’s suddenly dry again, and swallows as he sinks further into the flat pillow. His chest hurts. Every single one of his veins hurt.

“You couldn’t hear me,” Ben says again, sometime later. “But eventually, you couldn’t really hear Anthony either. He bailed, by the way.” His voice picks up a bit of life within the familiar territory of telling Klaus all the ways his acquaintances suck. “Slipped out of the room and ran when you stopped responding.”

“Who found me?” Klaus mumbles.

“Don’t know,” Ben responds, almost as listlessly. “Some college couple. You don’t know them. They dragged you to their car and then dragged you into the ER, but they split right away. Didn’t even kill the engine.” Ben looks back at him. “They wouldn’t have had any good info for the doctors anyway.”

“Smart,” Klaus comments. Kind too, but he doesn’t say that. It’s more than most people would have done for him. Dumb fucking luck that Klaus got any kind of help.

It’s not guaranteed that Klaus would’ve kicked the bucket without the medical support and monitoring, but it’s not guaranteed he would’ve lived either, and he knows it’s eating at Ben. It doesn’t exactly bother Klaus in the same way, and he knows that Ben’s aware of the fact, and that it only troubles him more.

They lapse into silence again, and Klaus doesn’t bother trying to think of anything to say. He’s sobering up in a rough way, all the good chemicals in his brain depleted and leaving him in a mood almost as dark as Ben’s. It’s loud in the small room, but thankfully his door’s been left open, and he’s almost grateful for the living people sounds, gentle and present and muted, because at least then he’s not lost in the swirling cacophony of the dead whining and dripping blood and spilling water. One of the ghosts is humming, definitely not using their inside voice, a song Klaus knows he’s heard but can’t place. His body feels dried out at the molecular level despite the IV fluids. His skin is tight and hot, his brain like a dying coral reef sunk to the bottom of his skull, colorless and brittle.

“You can’t keep going like this,” Ben tells him at some point. He’s shifted to sitting on the floor underneath the window, and his hood is down finally, which Klaus hopes means that the worst of his moping has passed. A doctor has just been in to check Klaus’s vitals, armed with mental health questionnaires and a penlight. Klaus passes with flying colors, and the doctor gives him a stern look but tells him he can be discharged as soon as he fills out some paperwork. But no one’s brought him any forms yet, so he’s just twiddling his thumbs and trying not to think too hard.

“It’ll be fine,” he says breezily

“Klaus—” Ben groans.

“No, no, listen,” Klaus says, and he feels a little more animated. The stillness and the fluids might’ve done him some good afterall, not that he’s going to admit it. “I made it through Halloween, right?”

“Barely,” Ben mutters bitterly, and Klaus pretends he doesn’t hear it.

“My first Halloween out on my own,” he says. “I’ve been out of the Academy for, like, not even a month! And so, okay, maybe not ideal, but I’m still figuring it out. And now we don’t even have to deal with Halloween until next year! I’m sure by then I’ll have some shit figured out.”

He’s an adult now, he realizes stupidly. He’s eighteen. The thought bolsters him just as much as it crushes him, but he clings to the lightness he’s only just gotten ahold of. His own person, what an idea. Another milestone Ben will never reach. But, somehow, Klaus has. He’s survived Reginald, and he’s free of the man if nothing else. That freedom is a yawning abyss stretched out ahead of him, terrifying and blank. And, shit, it’s not like Reginald taught them how real life works outside the Academy. He figures that, for a dry run, he’s not doing too badly, all things considered. It could be worse. And aren’t eighteen-year-olds supposed to be a little crazy? That whole college house was partying too. Those drugs didn’t come out of thin air.

Ben doesn’t say anything else, but it’s alright because Klaus’s brain is speeding through thoughts and fantasies about life outside the Academy. _By next year,_ he keeps thinking. It’ll be okay. He can get a job, maybe, and then he’ll have his own apartment. Or he can find a rich person to date and share their apartment with them. He really likes the way his friends in college do things; maybe he could even live with some of them? God, what if Klaus took a couple classes himself? Reginald literally _just_ kicked him out, but maybe if he could talk to Pogo, he could get some money for college if he, like, had his grades forwarded as proof? He has, he realizes, options.

It’s the nurse from before who comes back eventually, only to hand off a clipboard and assure him that she’ll be back for it. He makes it through his name, date of birth, today’s date, and the signature stating his consent to be released.

“Goddammit,” he mumbles, rubbing at his eyes. He jots down the Academy’s address because he doesn’t know what else to put, and then pauses again.

“Uh,” he says, glancing at Ben. “Do we even _have_ Social Security Numbers?”

“I’m sure we do,” Ben says, but he’s frowning as he comes to perch on Klaus’s bed. “Reginald legally adopted us, right? And he’s an American citizen.”

“Oh, jeez Louise,” Klaus groans, though it ends in more of a giggle. “We’re totally illegal immigrants, aren’t we?”

Ben rolls his eyes.

“We’ve gotta be legal at least on paper,” he reasons. “For, like, perceived legitimacy reasons as far as the Umbrella Academy went.”

“Okay,” Klaus says, raising his eyebrows. “What’s your Social Security Number then?”

“How the hell should I know?” Ben snaps back. “But just because we haven’t seen the cards doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Like, fuck, I still don’t even know how taxes work, it’s not like Dad was super concerned with us functioning in the real world.”

“Hmm...do you think my card says Four Hargreeves?” Klaus muses. “Or do you think we’ve never seen them because they have, like, the names our moms gave us?”

“I think that, y’know, if your name legally changes...they’d probably give you a new card with that name but the same number?” Ben says, but his whole body shifts uncomfortably in the way that means he’s blowing smoke out of his ass.

“What, so every time a woman changes her name after marriage she’d have to get a whole new card?” Klaus wrinkles his nose. “That can’t be right. That would be a super inconvenient system.”

“Okay, well,” Ben huffs. “Most of us weren’t born in the US, right? So since we were infants, I’m sure Reginald just got to put his new names for us on birth certificates and whatever.”

“So he literally put numbers one through seven on seven different birth certificates and filed them with the state?” Klaus snorts. “And, what, no one alerted CPS? That didn’t raise any red flags with anyone?”

“Well, Klaus, you see,” Ben begins in the prissy voice he always used for interviews, with exaggerated posture and his hands folded in his lap, “the man was very rich and very eccentric. So of course not.”

“Right, right, right,” Klaus says. “Capitalistic morality at its finest.”

Ben cracks a smile at that, and then looks back at the paper.

“Okay, okay, distracted,” he says. “What’s the next thing?”

Klaus jiggles the clipboard so it looks like a fish out of water.

“Health insurance provider,” he says sardonically.

They skip around on the paper, joking and bemoaning. Seriously, there’s no good way to explain that his primary care physician is his robot mother, at least not on the tiny line they’ve given him for his answer.

A lot of it’s straight-up bullshit, and the stuff that isn’t is mostly filled with Ben’s best guesses. Klaus doesn’t much care as long as he puts something down. He blusters his way through until he gets to the box labeled “Emergency Contact Info.” He and Ben both stare down at the page, and Klaus is reminded again that he’s an adult now. Instead of a sense of liberation and possibility behind the word, though, there’s just loneliness.

He’s an adult and he won’t have Reginald down by default anymore. And Reginald made it painfully clear that he wants nothing to do with Klaus anymore anyway. And, really, he’s not sure he’d want Dad getting called. Klaus knows the man wouldn’t come, wouldn’t _care,_ but he’d rather not have that confirmed.

Five hasn’t been around for a long time, and Ben doesn’t have a phone on account of being dead. Luther, Allison, and Vanya had still been living at the Academy when Klaus got kicked out, though he knows Allison had been actively searching for an agent and Vanya had been applying to schools. Diego left months ago, and hadn’t left a phone number or address.

Klaus considers leaving the space blank, but the thought leaves him feeling panicky. Sure, he might not take the best care of himself, and he might be at least a little resigned to that fact, but he doesn’t think he’s cruel enough to pull a Five on everyone and just vanish into thin air, leaving them wondering. Or maybe he’s selfish enough that if _(when)_ he kicks the bucket, he wants someone to know, to bury him, to grieve just a little bit.

And that’s what the box really is, isn’t it? It’s who they’re supposed to call when he finally takes too much, or when he pisses off the wrong person. It’s who will come and pick up his body so it doesn’t sit in a freezer drawer in the morgue and then get dumped wherever it is they dump John Does.

Klaus feels old and tired and young and scared all at once looking down at the hospital discharge papers. He writes down the Academy’s phone number next to Pogo’s name, because he thinks he can trust Pogo to care enough to do something if and when he gets that call.

Ben nods his approval at the choice, a sharp, singular motion, though all the levity’s drained from the room.

The nurse comes back eventually and flips through his answers. Then she gives him instructions in the form of a lecture (plenty of fluids, plenty of rest, someone at home should monitor him for fevers and seizures, yada, yada), unhooks his IV, and shows him the way to the door when he assures her he doesn’t need to call anyone for a ride, thanks though.

Once outside, he strides away from the doors like he has a destination in mind, but he only makes it around the corner before he drops heavily to a bench, winded and trembling. It’s overcast and misty, around six in the evening according to the clock he saw over the reception desk on his way out. The pavement is shiny and wet, though, so hopefully that means it’s been raining and not that it’s going to rain, necessarily.

He wonders if Reginald will pay the bill that’s sent to the Academy, if he’ll even open it, then decides he doesn’t care one way or another as a gust of particularly frigid air hits him in the face and steals his breath all over again.

“Okay, okay,” he murmurs to himself. “Okay.”

Ben’s sitting on the bench next to him, hunched and small. Klaus puts his elbows on his knees and lowers his face to his hands, telling himself to _think._

His nose is already cold against his palms, and the sun’s already inching down, hidden behind the jagged skyline.

_Okay,_ right, yes, it’s getting colder and later, and he needs a plan. Those big things, the apartments and jobs and the college crowds will have to wait for tomorrow. First he has to make it through the night, find somewhere warm, maybe get some food, figure out what part of town he’s ended up in, take stock.

Okay, okay, okay. There’s an order to do these things. He can only do one at a time.

Leaning back, he starts rifling through his pockets. A lighter in his jeans pocket, a nearly full pack of cigarettes in his jacket’s outer pocket, a DMT pen in the inner pocket, and about $60 in his pant pocket. Not ideal, but not too shabby, especially without his backpack. He eyes the pen for a minute, but slips it back into his pocket because _time and place._ It’ll be nice later, when he’s hunkered down for the night and doesn’t have to move anymore. Instead, for now, he lights a cigarette and starts looking around.

Jefferson Street, apparently. Huh, okay. He can work with this. There’s a diner a block or two to the east, they keep it warm in there and have the waffle fries he likes. Fuck, he’d even go for a hot cup of coffee right about now.

He’ll go in a minute, he tells himself. Just long enough to finish his smoke, and then he’ll get up and walk to the diner. God, he’s tired.

A distant wailing becomes a very near wailing all at once, and Klaus jumps a good couple inches off the bench as he whirls around. His stomach swoops with the sudden movement and sits like a chunk of ice when he sees the ghost dragging its way toward him. She looks like a teenager, hair long and blonde where it’s not stuck together with blood, her face a caved-in mess of gore and splintering bone, her legs ending in shredded ribbons above the knee. She screams again when she sees him looking (she has...most of one eye intact), which Klaus distantly notes is kind of impressive since she has no discernable mouth anymore, but most of him is busy flinching away, turning away, thinking _get away, get away_ on a loop.

“Okay!” he declares, launching to his feet and then stumbling until the ground stabilizes underneath him. A man in scrubs walking by on the sidewalk starts to walk faster, and Klaus ignores him and says, “That’s my cue.”

He brushes the ash off his sleeve from where he dropped the still-smoldering dogend in his surprise.

Okay, okay, this is fine, he’s just sobering up. The ghost doesn’t even have feet; even in his shitty, sorry state he’ll lose her in seconds. He points his feet north instead of east for a quick pit stop before dinner.

***

Later, high and synthetically warm but still shivering anyway, Klaus bums cigarettes off the cooks and busboys who come out into the alley for their smoke breaks, and he tells entertaining stories until they forget to tell him to get lost. Later still, and the restaurant closes. Klaus huddles in the deep-set side door of the restaurant as it begins to rain, resigned to his fate until he remembers the baggie in his pocket, frayed and probably not watertight anymore, and he sets to work picking the lock.

He’s always prided himself on his lockpicking skills, but between his shivering and his heavy eyes, it takes almost half an hour for him to get the door open.

“Think I could make more fries?” Klaus asks, contemplating the fryers along the wall in the kitchen.

“Dude,” Ben says, impressed or amused. “You ate like three orders of waffle fries earlier.”

And Ben’s not even exaggerating. Klaus got three orders of fries at the diner earlier because they’re cheap, and three or four cups of coffee because the refills are free. Still, he feels like he should steal something since he went to all the trouble of breaking and entering. Maybe he can just make himself a burger to-go closer to morning.

Klaus finds a storage closet, and the clean tablecloths folded within, and then he makes a nest for himself in a corner of the kitchen where he has good sightlines to the doors leading in. He snorts some more E off a clean plate, and steals a bottle of pinot, and hits the DMT pen four times in quick succession.

His blastoff has nothing to do with aliens or death for once (probably because Dick’s not there to tell him stories of abductions and the afterlife as it hits, honestly). Instead, words spin like lace into the air around him, the full weight of them slipping down his lungs and pressing sharp edges to his limits. Ben too, but his brother curls into them like an aerialist into their silks, finding comfort in the bondage. Ben doesn’t like to talk about it much, and Klaus gets it because dying a virgin must suck, but Klaus is pretty sure that whatever’s left of Ben’s sexuality at least intellectually gets the appeal of being held down, restrained, stilled and taken care of. (Either that, or Ben simply doesn’t deem it a kink of Klaus’s as deserving of shame as some of the more reckless or strange. Both are actually solid possibilities.)

Klaus abandons himself, falling underneath an avalanche of every manifested word that floats through his head, in awe at all of it. There’s terror there, held at bay by the sheer intensity of his transfixion. The words shimmer heavily, and Klaus is slammed by the idea that this must be how Allison experiences language all the time, their influence concrete and immediate, and then he really _does_ get taken over by his fear, gripping an inner chamber of his heart and squeezing. No wonder she walks around looking like she’s in on a secret nobody else knows. That smile and the arched eyebrow and _I heard a rumor…_

And Ben, too, who’s arguably _only_ made up of words anymore, who has no physical being (except visually, and even then it’s only where Klaus is concerned). Ben, who still carries around the book he died with like a security blanket, who talks and pleads and reasons with Klaus no matter how resistant he is, who’s kept his ghostly sanity intact with the power of diligently lining up his thoughts into coherent sentences and sharing them, even when Klaus doesn’t acknowledge him.

Then there’s Klaus himself. He’s not stupid or particularly unaware; he knows he can be charming and downright manipulative. Every word out of his mouth, while not as obviously solid as Allison’s, weave into the fabric of reality around him, smoke bombs and mirrors and shining, dazzling things.

It takes a bizarre infinite-monkeys-on-infinite-typewriters turn somewhere in the middle, and he falls into a bit of a Wonderland territory, but he makes it into more of a swan dive.

When he comes back to himself, he’s warm and the edges of his physical being are staticky and mirage-like. It’s only been a few minutes—the wonders of DMT—but Ben seems sullen again, the way he gets whenever Klaus loses his grip on reality and goes off somewhere else, unreachable and effectively lost.

“Cora’s friend writes poetry,” Klaus gasps out before he’s really gotten his whole body back.

Ben shushes him miserably.

“You would’ve really liked it,” Klaus tells him, trying to keep his eyes focused. “Fuck, I should’ve gotten her last name. If she ever publishes, I won’t be able to find her.”

“It’s okay,” Ben says tonelessly.

Klaus squeezes his eyes shut and tries to remember, which is like trying to use an atrophied muscle. But this is _important._

“It’s okay, I don’t mouth to myself,” Klaus quotes, even though he’s sure he’s getting it wrong. “But anyway, despite my best efforts...the way everything happens tonight, my tongue clicks once at the front of my palate and once at the back.”

He slumps a little when he’s done, shivers with the release of tension. At least the word _palate_ is right, he remembers the peculiarity of it.

“Motion or change,” Ben says, but he says it unusually. There’s a niceness in his tone that Klaus isn’t used to, that’s not normally there when he fires off comments. “And identity or rest, these are the first and second secrets of nature: Motion and Rest.”

_Oh,_ Klaus realizes. He’s quoting someone.

“The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring.”

Klaus keeps his mouth shut, but that’s where Ben stops, so he thinks instead.

Motion, the thing Klaus clings to, the tenet he chants like an order over and over until it acts as a metronome he can spin out to. And...rest? Rest, which Klaus daydreams about like he and Allison used to dream about big white weddings. The siren call, the only temptation Klaus thinks might one day win out over all the others.

His brain cycles between the concepts and then again, but his perspectives don’t shift. The words flit through the air and don’t settle, even though Klaus knows they’re substantial.

“Life and death,” he settles on, saying it confidently like the concepts line up perfectly.

“No,” Ben says, though he sounds more exasperated than downtrodden, so he guesses it’s fine. _”Sleep,_ man. You look like shit, and if you’re still here when someone comes to open up, you’ll be in deep shit.”

Klaus snorts.

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever, okay,” he says, half disappointed in himself for not being able to give Ben the words he needs for his cocoons and not even being able to hear what his brother is saying, and half ready to ditch the layered speech. The track of the conversation is slippery, and he really does feel like shit.

He settles deeper into the tablecloths and closes his eyes, telling himself it’s getting easier to sleep with his shoes on, telling himself that he’s safe from Reginald, that he’s not even alone, even if that’s what any living person would see in the scene of the kitchen, even if he can’t hear Ben’s breathing because Ben doesn’t breathe or feel his body heat because he has no body heat, telling himself it’s okay, it’s okay until it’s a steady mantra, telling himself to Rest now because in the morning he’ll have to find the strength for Motion, and who knows when he’ll be able to stop again.

He tells himself this is what he fantasized about for years, the chance to be an adult and to fall asleep alone, in the quiet, free at last, free at last.

He tests it out, not letting his face move at all, using only his tongue and the hollow space in the cage of his teeth, mouthing _it’s okay_ with his lips still sealed. The tip of his tongue taps the roof of his mouth once near the front, and once farther back. It feels nice under the film of molly, so he does it again and again, imagining the words solid around him, a spiderweb of _okay._

The rest of it he’ll figure out tomorrow. He just needs to make it through tonight first.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, okay, okay! Thank you for reading! A lot of hurt, here......not so much comfort. But a second part is already in the works, with much more comfort involved! This first part was just a lot longer than I originally intended, so it gets its own story. But I promise it'll all be (more) okay in the end.
> 
> Would love to hear thoughts/comments!


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